Many of those powerless residents are now asking hard questions of the area's power monopoly, which has spent millions of dollars fighting policies that would have strengthened the grid in the event of a major storm like Irma and, more broadly, stemmed the carbon-fueled climate change likely fueling monster storms.

"I am one of the many that has now been without power for more than two days as a result of Hurricane Irma," Elise McKenna, a West Palm Beach resident, told New Times via email. "My confusion came when so many of us lost power during the early hours of the storm that basically avoided us. We've been told time and time again that rate increases were to help prepare us for future storms."

McKenna is far from alone. FPL's workers on the ground seem to be doing all they can to fix downed lines and restore power to homes, and they deserve huge credit for working around the clock in awful conditions.

But the company's corporate and government-relations wings have serious questions to...

Between 1773 and 1775, George Gauld, a surveyor with the British Admiralty, immortalized the coast of the Florida Keys in ink. Though his most pressing goal was to record the depth of the sea — to prevent future shipwrecks — Gauld embraced his naturalist side, too. He sprinkled his maps with miscellany that later charts would omit: where sea turtles made their nests, or the colors and consistency of sand.

Gauld also took note of the corals he saw. And in doing so he created the oldest known records of Florida reefs.

“With the early charts you can actually see the reef itself being drawn,” said Loren McClenachan, a marine ecologist at Colby College in Maine. “It matches almost exactly with the satellite data.” In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, McClenachan and her colleagues compared those 240-year-old observations with present-day satellite images.

A stark picture of shrinking coral emerged: Half of the reefs recorded in the 1770s are missing from the satellite data.

The coral nearest to shore fared the worst, with 88 percent of the coral that Gauld recorded now gone. At the fore-reef, the coral at the most seaward edge of the reef, there appeared to be no loss between historical coral observations and modern habitat maps. “I was surprised that there was such a strong spatial gradient,” McClenachan said....

If the first thing that comes to mind when you think about ants is "industrious," you might be in for a surprise. In 2015, biologists at the University of Arizona reported that a sizable chunk of the "workers" that make up an ant colony spent the vast majority of their day engaging in one task: doing absolutely nothing.

"They really just sit there," says Daniel Charbonneau, who dedicated his Ph.D. thesis to studying the behavior (or lack thereof) of these lazy ants. "And whenever they're doing anything other than doing nothing, they do chores around the nest, like a bit of brood care here or grooming another worker there."

Observing colonies of ants maintained in the lab, Charbonneau found that an average of 40 percent of individuals are mostly inactive, with some variation between seasons, colonies and species. And his ants, which belong to the species Temnothorax rugatulus, don't appear to be freaks of nature, Charbonneau says, as similar patterns can be observed in other social insects, even honey bees. Charbonneau and his doctoral adviser, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Anna Dornhaus, published those results in 2015. At the time, the researchers could only speculate over the purpose of keeping around hordes of inactive "workers."

In a new paper, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, authors Charbonneau, Takao Sasaki of the University of Oxford and Dornhaus show for the first time that inactive...

A related observation is that exposure to high concentrations of prenatal testosterone leads to the development of “hyper masculine” facial features. It follows that if the Extreme Male Brain theory of autism is accurate, then autistic people will have hypermasculine faces.

A new study in Scientific Reports put this logic to the test, and consistent with the Extreme Male Brain theory, found that autistic girls and boys had more masculine faces as compared with neurotypical control children.

Past research into whether autistic people tend to have stereotypically masculine facial features has been mixed. Women with sub-clinical autistic traits or a diagnosis of autism have been found to have more masculine than average faces, but studies with autistic men have sometimes found no difference from...

Fansubbing site Undertexter.se was raided by police in the summer of 2013, following complaints from Hollywood. Four years later the case has come to an end after a Swedish District Court sentenced the operator for copyright infringement. The decision confirms that the unauthorized distribution of movie subtitles is a crime in Sweden.

Every day millions of people enjoy fan-made subtitles. They help foreigners understand English-speaking entertainment and provide the deaf with a way to comprehend audio.

Quite often these subtitles are used in combination with pirated files. This is a thorn in the side to copyright holder groups, who see this as a threat to their business.

In Sweden, Undertexter was one of the leading subtitle resources for roughly a decade. The site allowed users to submit their own translated subtitles for movies and TV shows, which were then made available to the public.

The video gaming industry has transitioned from a group of backyard innovators to an industry of multi-billion dollar companies, hiring psychologists, neuroscientists and marketing experts to turn customers into addicts. The latest trend is the creation of “whales,” people so addicted to games that they spend their entire life savings to keep playing.

Collectively, the hobbyist companies of the early industry produced some of the most innovative genres of video game history – the adventure game, the real-time strategy, the city-builder, the role-playing game – all through experimentation and garage-style company development.

Against the backdrop of shrieking demons rallying for battle against human forces, Mune entered text into the comic's empty speech bubbles. "Originally they were but men," he wrote. "By virtue of uncommon tenacity were they reborn through causality."

No one turns piracy into poetry quite like Mune. Eight years of rendering the blockbuster manga Berserk's Japanese dialogue into English has lent Mune respect in the underground digital landscape of otaku, the Japanese term for a manga and anime fanatic. His prose, admirers say, is vivid yet linguistically accurate. He can translate florid, archaic kanji into lyrical English dialogue. The digital Berserk pages bearing his words are clean with deep, black lines.

Mune, 26, is a scanlator, an underground manga-lover who scans, translates, edits, and disseminates Japanese comics to overseas audiences, unofficially and without publishers' consent. His brand of piracy is more time-consuming than most; immediately after a Berserk chapter's release, he and his team of five scanlators begin to slave hours away over Photoshop with a Japanese dictionary. Scanlating one manga chapter can take them over 30 hours. In the past, Mune, who heads up the EvilGenius scanlation group, has stayed up for the duration of a project. He has never been paid for this work. Also, it's illegal.

Since the mid-90s, when manga was just entering Westerners' consciousness, factions of scanlators...